Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 2, 2006

Hidden Labels in Gmail

If you enable saving your chat history in Gmail, your conversations from Google Talk are saved as standard emails. To make them stand out from the rest of messages, Gmail adds two labels: chat and chats.

If you want to search your chats, you just have to add label:chat to your query. If you want to search only your mail, exclude the chats by adding -label:chat.

Gmail has many other hidden labels that can make your life easier, so you don't have to use the advanced search:

* label:star (label:starred) - search only your starred messages. You can use the star button like a bookmarking system. Star only important messages.

* label:draft (or label:drafts) - search only unfinished messages. Drafts could be used for storing notes or emails that must be sent later.

* label:sent (or label:sentmail, label:sent-mail, label:sent mail ) - search only sent mail. It may be useful to restrict your search only to messages you've sent, or only to messages you've received if you add a minus.

It's nice that you can combine all these labels with user-defined labels in a query. To show results that have both label A and label B, just search for label:A label:B. To show results that have one of the labels A and B or both, just search for label:A OR label:B.

Update: Instead of label:A, you can just type l:A. [Thank you, Busse].

A long time ago it was also possible to create Labels with those system name, such as "Unread". As a result, I have an "Unread" label which gathers all my unread mail (including mails I don't see in the inbox because some filters take care of them and archive it) which is way cool and very missed in more recent accounts.

Why isn't there an "unlabeled" (e.g., label:unlabeled)? I usually have most of my messages labeled (automatically or manually). I would like to be able to view all of my messages that I haven't labeled yet.

There's no big difference. When you enter "label:spam", you'll see search results. When you click on "Spam", Gmail shows the same messages as before, but it also adds some appropriate actions like "Not Spam".